[va-bird] Re: Email problems - posting problems

It's almost 5 a.m. and I haven't been to sleep yet, and I really don't care
if I offend people. I'd suggest that some of the people jumping on the
dump-FreeLists bandwagon should get a firmer grasp on all the issues
involved. The internet suffers from equipment failure and operator error.
The former could be hard drive failure, power outages, someone cutting a
cable; the latter could be someone falling asleep on the job or being
overworked or failing to configure a system optimally...or many other
things.

There is a website called the Internet Traffic Report <
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm> that monitors the
backbones of the internet. Currently in North America we see this report:
*Avg. Response Time:* 71 (msec)
*Avg. Packet Loss:* 1 %
*Total Routers:* 50
*Network up:* 96 %

That's pretty good, and probably better than normal. Contrast that with
South America:
*Avg. Response Time:* 306 (msec)
*Avg. Packet Loss:* 16 %
*Total Routers:* 6
*Network up:* 83 %

There are only four percent of the networks down in North America, but two
of them are in Texas and people in the Dallas/Pampa areas will be having
problems using the internet. Email goes out in packets and 16% of the
packets are being lost in South America. There will be many message never
getting to their destinations. While 1% seems like a small figure, consider
the volume of traffic. It's huge.

One needs to be certain that the problem actually lies with FreeLists (Avenir
Technologies), who runs the servers or with the Ecartis software they use
before disrupting this list by moving it. One might start by asking whether
Mr. Mocko has VA-Bird configured optimally. He may very well have, but the
list if highly configurable and perhaps other settings would help. For one
thing, you should be able to set your subscription so you will receive a
copy abck from the list server of any message you send to it. This might be
useful for those experiencing problems. Problems can arise because many
email programs do not conorm completely with recognized-standards. This
could trigger spam filters, or even composing email with a word processor
might add non-visible formatting characters that could trigger the filters.
A couple of instances from my life will serve to illuminate this.My sister
frequently forgets to add a subject to her emails to me and my anti-virus
program does not like this. Each tiem I get one, it pops up with a
"Suspicious Subject" warning and I have to tell it to ignore it...twice.
However, some other messages without subjects do not set off the alarm. Is
the problem with my a/v program or is it because different email programs
with different treatments are being used to send the respective messages?
Also, I get messages flagged as potential spam because of "unusual white
space"--too many carriage returns before the actual message begins.

There are many, many things that could be the root of the problem, including
the mail server of your ISP. I think it important to remove the local
considerations before embarking on exteme steps to solve a problem that may
just be inhernet to the very nature of the internet.

C'est ça,
Cliff Otto
Alexandria

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